A Touch of Spice (6 page)

“Easy, sweetheart.” It was Jackie’s turn to interfere, clenching around him tightly. He whimpered, scrunching up his eyes. “You forget about me already?” She had been so afraid of the consequences of a threesome that she hadn’t spent nearly enough time considering how it might feel to have two men going at each other and her all at the same time. The answer was right here, as Tony rolled his hips against hers, bearing down to rub the base of his thick length against her labia. His balls rested snugly against her other hole, a slow slap of skin that was almost obscene in the too-quiet bedroom.

There was so much noise in the pornos she’d watched with Marten that to experience something like this in almost complete silence, without fake moaning or crude language, felt strangely worshipful. It was certainly close to pure bliss, particularly when Tony got into his stride and picked up the pace. Every thrust jostled her against the bed, sweat building up in the crevices of her collarbones and under her breasts, gluing her to Tony in all the places they weren’t yet connected. With a sharp, low groan she felt rather than saw Marten come. Her boyfriend was still on his knees, perched over panting, red-faced Tony who could do no more than swallow and take it.

A hot trickle of cum dribbled from his lips onto her cheek, enough to push her over the edge. Jackie pulled Tony tight with both legs hooked around his waist and let him take her as hard as he needed to. Orgasm lashed through her like liquid flame. If she didn’t scream, it was only because Tony had his lips upon hers, smothering the sound. His whole body was undulating, muscles bunched tightly as he chased his own release. She felt it moments later, as the shudders of her own climax ebbed and eventually released their grip on her weary muscles.

Marten caught her eye over Tony’s shoulder and together they worked to spill their one-time lover on his back onto the sheets. His cock slipped warm and slick and soft from Jackie, the condom tinting his length pearly white at the head.

“Wow,” Jackie said, dropping to her side on the mattress. She felt wrung out, a pleasant ache pulsating between her thighs from the rigorous fuck. Marten didn’t look any less affected. His hair, normally slicked back like a Hollywood movie star’s, stood out in sweaty clumps over his ears. His chest was stained pink with a flush of excitement. He had definitely enjoyed himself.

Methodically, Jackie wiped her cum-stained cheek against the sheets, and rose up onto her elbows to do the same for Tony. Watching him take the brunt of Marten’s release had been a thrill—her insides felt all fidgety at the memory. She knew that it was a sight she’d come back to the next time she was alone with her vibrator. Tony looked utterly fucked out like this, much like in his films, only this time Jackie could see up close and personal how he reacted to someone cuddling close to his side, the slow blinking of his hooded eyes as he smiled up at her.

“You two,” Tony drawled, his lips kiss-swollen and wet with spit, “are not what it says on the tin.”

“Oh?” Jackie arched a brow, gently brushing the evidence of Marten’s climax from their lover’s beard. It was more than she allowed him to do when she was blowing him and Marten never seemed to mind, but there was a clear and obvious thrill in seeing someone so vividly soiled with her boyfriend’s cum. It did things to her nether regions. “Is that a bad thing?”

Tony shook his head slowly, every gesture sluggish as his breaths gradually returned to normal. “Nah, just… You didn’t say you were into dominance stuff, is all.” He said it like it was nothing, only a footnote omitted in the scheme of a larger point.

It wasn’t how it rang to Jackie. Dominance and submission, D/s for short, was porn and erotic novels. It was handcuffs and paddles and she’d never given any of those things more than a passing thought. She couldn’t deny finding them sexy, but it was one thing to masturbate to an idea and another to consider bringing it into her actual sex life, where egos were brittle and people could easily get hurt. Just like threesomes. Marten wasn’t the type to take the paddle anyway, she knew that instinctively.

She felt the mattress shift as Marten settled down on Tony’s other side. “We’re not,” her boyfriend said, speaking for them both with little conviction. He looked to Jackie for confirmation. She nodded, though she felt equally uneasy with the answer.

“We’re really not into anything, um…”

Even if he wasn’t convinced by their tepid denials, Tony didn’t seem interested in arguing the point. “Could’ve fooled me,” he murmured, eyes drooping shut. “Do you guys mind if I rest here for a bit? I’m only going to need a couple of minutes to get my shit together and then I’ll be out of your hair. Just need a few to…” The rest of his meandering rationale was lost to a yawn.

“Take as long as you need,” Jackie interjected, shamelessly burrowing closer. “I’m pretty beat myself. Marten?”

“Yeah, me too. Besides,” he added with a crooked grin, “it’s still my birthday.”

If what Tony had said before about their proclivities was bothering him as much as it was bothering Jackie, then he did a very good job hiding it. His smile only vanished as he slowly drifted to sleep.

Chapter Five

“I don’t feel thirty,” Marten moaned as he stabbed disposable chopsticks into his shrimp noodles. “Should I?” He was sitting cross-legged on the floor, half a foot from Jackie and her garish but much beloved hand-knitted quilt. Leaving the bedroom had been a slow unravelling, with Jackie being the first to disappear into the bathroom for a shower, then Tony pleading a need to take a leak, and finally Marten complaining about the lack of dinner. His rumbling stomach had been the direct cause of the takeout cartons spread all over the coffee table.

The sun had already crept out of the sky by the time they had emerged from the bedroom sluggish and staggering like vampires. Their chance encounter was no longer fuelled by desire and Tony had kept intimating that he might like to get home. Jackie had suggested with takeout from a nearby Thai restaurant to diffuse the tension she’d felt building between them. It only meant the inevitable goodbyes were postponed, and the sense of awkwardness lingered.

Marten got his own birthday wish in the end—takeout on the couch and an old episode of
Star Trek
playing mutely on the TV. No pressure, no more surprises. Jackie did her best to jazz up the experience with a bottle of red wine, uncorked long before Tony had made short work of their pretexts and postponements, but even so it wasn’t much of a celebration. Maybe it didn’t have to be.

“I didn’t feel any different either,” she said, shrugging. “Same old student loan payments to struggle with, same old tiny frustrations…”

“Same here,” Tony breathed, licking wine from his lips.

“You’re
not
thirty,” Jackie protested.

“Power of imagination, love!” He was propped against the backrest with both legs dangling off one end of the couch, a picture of leisure and calm belied only by his wandering eyes. He seemed content to listen to them speak rather than participate and Jackie couldn’t make out if that was supposed to be a sign that she was infringing on that fine line between hospitality and invasiveness or just a matter of preference. She made do by telling herself that Tony was a big boy, he could handle himself if things got too uncomfortable.

Marten must have sensed her unease, because the next words out of his mouth were, “So Tony… How does an Englishman end up in Rotterdam?” An Englishman, he asked, not a porn star. His tact was to be envied.

“Welshman,” Tony corrected gamely. “Not that it matters. I, uh, followed a girl.” She had been a friend from high school, he explained, translating ‘sixth form’ to ‘high school’ and terminology Jackie would more easily understand. Apparently after his A levels, Tony had decided to do a bit of sightseeing. His girlfriend at the time had wanted to backpack through Europe and he had been just smitten enough to follow. “You have to understand, we weren’t the richest of kids, so the thought of roughing it for a couple of months wasn’t much of a deterrent. We started in France, went down to Spain… Spent a couple of days in northern Italy, hoping to see celebrities sunning themselves by Lake Como. Then it was off to Eastern Europe.”

“That sounds like what we did,” Jackie murmured, grinning as she nudged Marten with her toes. “Except for us it was after we finished college…”

“Did you stop in Minsk, too?”

“What happened in Minsk?” Marten asked aloud, the question already perching on Jackie’s lips.

Tony smiled. “My girlfriend decided she wasn’t my girlfriend anymore. Big Belarusian soccer player versus Welsh bloke with no real future? Soccer player wins every time.” He reached to set his wine glass on the coffee table, the muscles in his forearm straining under a rumpled shirtsleeve. Jackie bit back the sudden urge to run her tongue over the green-blue veins so clearly drawn beneath the skin.

“That’s rough,” she said instead, trying to muster empathy. “So you started back for the UK and wound up in Rotterdam instead?”

“Something like that…” Tony yawned. “Guys, I should probably head home.”

Marten’s voice cracked, “Already? I mean—what time is it, anyway?”

Jackie confirmed that it wasn’t so late, only nine p.m. They had spent a good part of the day in bed and the other part talking over each other, but disaster had been narrowly avoided and there were hours still to go before sunrise.

“Do you want to stay?” Jackie pressed Tony. “You should stay.”

“I should leave you guys to it,” Tony insisted. He levered himself to his feet slowly but steadily, as if red wine wasn’t enough of a shackle to keep him down. Their entreaties couldn’t manage it, either.

Jackie walked him to the door. “I’ll call you in the morning. If you’d like to meet up again…”

“Would you?” he asked, brow arched quizzically.

“I… Yeah. I would.” Was that strange? Judging by the look on Tony’ face, it wasn’t exactly common. If he didn’t want to see her—them—again, he could always just refuse to take their calls. Jackie’s ego could take it.

Marten shook Tony’s hand, strangely officious now that they were dressed and behaving like rational beings again. “Thank you. For tonight. It was, uh…”

“I’m glad you had a good time,” Tony said, smiling crookedly. “And happy birthday. Again.”

The lift doors closed on his slightly forced grin. Jackie was left to lock up behind him feeling oddly bereft. “Think we should’ve tried harder to get him to stay?” she mused.

“You like him,” Marten said. Silhouetted in the glow of the kitchen spotlights, he looked almost alien, all shadow and a sharp, toothy smile.

“I like you, too,” Jackie answered, sidestepping the question as she went to fold herself in her boyfriend’s arms. Their misunderstanding wasn’t yet put to rest. She could feel it thrumming like a frayed chord just about ready to snap.

Marten seized her shoulders, tilting back at the waist. The light caught on his cheekbones and the slant of his upturned lips. “It’s okay if you like him. You have good taste.” He kissed her before Jackie could misconstrue his meaning as some kind of reprimand.

She remembered the way Marten had touched Tony, his hands so sure, so deft on that chiselled body, and she couldn’t help the flare of excitement that burned within her at the memory. It would be a nice experience to hoard inside her mind, even if it never happened again, but it would be even nicer to repeat it. If only Tony were interested, too. The swiftness of his escape made her wonder. He’d probably only waited so long out of politeness.

“Maybe he’ll call,” Marten suggested, pecking her on the nose.

“Maybe,” Jackie echoed and went to toss away the empty takeaway cartons.

* * * *

By Monday, he still hadn’t called.

“Your phone’s been silent all day,” Clara pointed out over lunch. They weren’t exactly friends, but they knew enough about each other to share meals and gossip. Jackie’s role was mostly as listener. Clara was still new enough to the firm that she was only now discovering all the many pitfalls of the print industry, but being new wasn’t the same as being deaf and blind. When it came to paying attention to the little things, she could be as sharp as a blade. “Last week,” she said, “you were texting every half hour. And you were
grinning
, so I’m guessing we’re not talking about just any old kind of texting… Now it’s all quiet on the smartphone front. What happened?”

Jackie viciously stabbed a piece of broccoli before drowning it in dressing. “Nothing. Why should anything be happening?”

“Wasn’t it your boyfriend’s birthday last weekend? Did something go wrong?” Clara seemed to be salivating at the thought. She couldn’t be so lacking in entertainment that she relied on Jackie for ways to brighten up her day, surely. Then again, Clara rarely spoke of her own romantic life, so maybe there was some kind of vicarious living going on.

It wasn’t enough to bother Jackie, who had gone to an all girls boarding school all the way through to her eighteenth birthday and was well used to living in a tiny, reclusive world of women. Their way of marrying war and friendship wasn’t so foreign to her. And for better or worse, Clara was her only outlet. “Hypothetically speaking, if you had a one-night stand with a guy you barely knew and you wanted to see him again… How would you go about it?”

Clara’s lips curled into a moue of mock disappointment. “First of all, what makes you think I haven’t? And second of all, am I not supposed to remind you of the aforementioned boyfriend?”

“Hypothetically speaking, remember?” Jackie insisted, regretting ever bringing up the subject. She should have known better—by the end of the day, the boys in the mailroom would know she was cheating—or thinking of cheating—on Marten. That it wasn’t true wouldn’t delay the grapevine.

Though she looked far from convinced, Clara set down her veggie wrap and sighed. “
Hypothetically speaking
, I’d call him and say hi, remember me? I’m the girl you had sex with last whenever. I want to do it again.” Given that this was Clara and her convoluted, slightly Machiavellian approach to life, it was a refreshingly straightforward answer.